Festivals: SXSW

Can’t wait for the curtain to be raised on upcoming SXSW world premieres and unsatisfied with reading synopses? Well, there are other ways of exploring what the Texas-based festival has in store for lucky badge-holders. Thunder Road and Prospect are...

Austin's annual entertainment smorgasboard, SXSW, is set to explode all over Central Texas beginning on March 9th, and today the Film Festival announced the lineup for my favorite section of the event, the Midnighters. These are the films that Screen...

Out today on VOD is Brett Whitcomb's SXSW documentary A Life in Waves, a film about electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani. The film is being released by Gunpowder & Sky and we have been asked to share a clip with...

Our friends at Raven Banner Entertainment have acquired all rights here in Canada to Natalia Leite's revenge thriller M.F.A. The thriller about sexual violence on campus was written by Leah McKendrick who also stars in the film. Raven Banner...

The horror genre is one of the most forgiving there is. Fanatics regularly overlook low-budgets, no-name actors, questionable performances, and mediocre writing if a film delivers the kind of thrills that turn them on. The horror-comedy, however, is a far...

Four years ago, Evan Katz made his directorial debut with the pitch-black comedy thriller Cheap Thrills, pitting Pat Healy against Ethan Embry in a diabolical, desperate game of survival. Now Katz has returned to the director's chair with Small Crimes,...

Every couple has their meeting anecdote to tell at dinner parties and hopefully to their grandchildren years down the line, but few, if any, will top screenwriters, Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon's. It is often asked of married people,...

It's hard to find a film festival these days that doesn't feature some sort of VR/AR programming and the tech-heavy SXSW is of course no exception. In fact, the festival featured a spin-off "convergence" program that was open to both...

In the not too distant future of Infinity Baby, stem cell research has caused a freak side effect wherein a certain breed of newborns will not age, rather they'll stay babies for their entire lives. Society has deemed them "infinity...

David Lynch is one of the great mysteries in the filmmaking world. His films are meticulously constructed enigmas, which require the same type of open minded approach to understanding as it likely takes Lynch himself to paint with images. His...

With great lead performances by Steven Yeun and Samara Weaving, a great musical score by Steve Moore, and great bloody action masterminded by director Joe Lynch, Mayhem is almost too much fun. It's the perfect example of a movie that...

It's been an excellent year for documentaries already in 2017 with such incredible films as Icarus, An Inconvenient Sequel, Nobody Speak, and Trophy all premiering at Sundance (those last two playing SXSW as well). There have been several new great...

Serial killer thrillers that deal with the dark subject matter of abuse and sexual victimization are the cinematic equivalent of playing with fire. Especially if your film is based loosely on real life crimes, as is the case with Hounds...

Male filmmakers have been exploiting the violent rape of women on screen for decades. How do female filmmakers deal with the subject? The Light of the Moon, written and directed by Jessica M. Thompson, and M.F.A., written by Leah McKendrick...

I think we were all pretty skeptical upon hearing the announcement that James Franco would be bringing the story of the making of Tommy Wiseau's The Room to the big screen over three years ago; at least those of us...

SXSW 2017 Dispatch: Great Crime Films, Both Big and Small Late night booze-fueled taco runs be damned, the SXSW train just keeps chugging along. There have been an ridiculous number of great moves in this year's program, many of which,...

Kicking heroin and staying off it for 20 years is only the first step for Renton. Facing the likely elimination of his office job, Renton (Ewan McGregor) returns to Edinburgh, Scotland in search of something he cannot yet identify. Lost...

Voom voom voom! So begins Edgar Wright's Baby Driver, which finds Ansel Elgort behind the wheel as a getaway driver, rocking out to the a song blasting from the buds planted in his ears. In the privacy of his own...